Lin Lu （b.1955）is concurrently the member of the standing committee of the Li Poetry Society and the editorial board of the “Li Poetry Magazine”. She is also a member of the Taiwan Modern Poets Association. From the year 2009, she serves in the jury of the annual Taiwan Modern Poetry Collection. Her critics and poems are frequently published in “Li Poetry Magazine” and “Taiwan Modern Poetry”. In the year 2005 and 2009, she participated in the Taiwan-Mongolia Poetry Festival held in Mongolia. Her poetry collection “Star Chrysanthemum” was published by the New Taipei City Culture Bureau, Taiwan, and her work ”Wind from Hometown” was selected into the 2012 course materials of the school of the language and culture studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Poems by Lin Lu

The Road Back Home

I

        (In memory of a Taiwanese at Chepo Farm in Panama)

With the dry season’s arrival, the tree blossoms with their

fiery orange and provocative purple take one by surprise, as

they line the somber winding gravel road, indulgently, recklessly

opening in their wild way.

    I ask my loneliness:

    How can you go along with such a din?

    The resplendent sun’s always a cruel roast, there being only

      occasional shade, and for company there’s the wriggling

      caterpillars hanging on their threads, and oh the cicadas

      who’ve come from afar to make this their home!

      Unheeding of all emotions, they perform for me the dirge

      of self-exile in this season.

I….

Take up my strides that are gradually growing old

Slowly in   the uninhibited long night

The way back home

But, you thrill

Has long since touched the heart

Erect of wing, drawing water, the butterfly flock

Fires up a spate

Of mad turbulence

The Road Back Home

II

(In memory of a stranger in Santiago in the Panamanian interior, who had suffered the white terror)

The dust blows up to cover ten thousand miles

I am the dandelion seed

According to wind speed   sometimes floating sometimes

   setting

And last   fatally the foot falls there

In that little lonely village in the desert.

And my dread and solitude

Has long since gone by the name of paisano[1]

Almost beyond recognition

Skin color of ancient bronze black

Is

I cannot but be assimilated

Pathos

While dreaming

At the risk of life yet inescapable is

The limitless extension of the devil’s canopy of the white

  terror

I   can only metamorphose into

A self-amputating lizard

Painfully breaking the thread that extends decades of

The road back home

This Page

You turn to this page

I turn to this page

He turns to this page

The page

That we all turn to

Waits in vain

For an endless expectation

Or

A forever farewell

At the dark night

Someone

Crying

in the forsaken wilderness

As a white painting cloth

torne by daggers

Whether this page

Will become

A flying white flag in the storm

Patting

Those

Irreversible

Memories

A Flower

Loneliness is a flower

That blooms on a high cliff

Bracing the winds heartlessness

Drawing the rains abuse

Tightly clenching to the cliff

While raising its white collar

Its natural solitude

Demands on blowing the horn of life

Stopping wave after wave

Of deafening waves

Poetry’s Skylight

There happens to be a skylight

That solely opens itself

For empty romanticism

The stars and moon say

It is truly lonely

There happens to be a skylight

That in order to pull through the long nights

Cannot but

Open itself from deep within its soul

The stars and the moon say

Cry now

Loneliness

Glancing at the poetry across Love River’s bank

“Pain will pass away,

Beauty will remain.”

For me

You opened

A surprise

We read together

The skylight of poetry

The stars and the moon say

Embrace the beauty